The Legend Of Heroes - Interview @ RPGamer

by Couchpotato, 2013-09-10 00:39:52

RPGamer interviews Ken Berry the Executive Vice President of XSEED Games about the release of The Legend Of Heroes on Steam.

Michael A. Cunningham (RPGamer, Editor-in-Chief): Greetings, and thanks for taking the time to chat with us. Let's jump into the big news, Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC is coming to Steam. How did this localization partnership come about?

Ken Berry (XSEED Games, Executive Vice President): Well, after the very long and arduous localization process to get the first one out, sales were a bit disappointing at first considering how much effort and expense went into the project. Falcom wasn't sure they could commit to another gargantuan localization programming effort that was almost double the size and scope of what we had just done, and to be honest we weren't sure we could handle it on our end either. As we were continuing to debate for months what to do, Andrew at Carpe Fulgur offered to take over the translation and editing duties, freeing us up to continue working on all the other projects we already had. That was over 2 years ago, and Carpe Fulgur's been working on it ever since.

As for the Falcom side, thankfully sales of the original Trails has had a long tail and the fans have also been very vocal in their support of the series. That coupled with the great success that Falcom's Ys titles have had on Steam made their decision easier from a financial standpoint.

MAC: I know the amount of text is massive, but other than that what challenges did you face during the localization process?

KB: The main thing has been from a business point of view, especially with the very long localization time needed and the PSP market fading quickly. Should we just concentrate on a PC release despite all the fans hounding us for over 2 years for the sequel having played it on the PSP? Keep in mind that at this time Falcom had publicly stated that Trails SC could not be sold digitally on PSN due to the 2-UMD game being programmed in a certain way. Luckily, this technical issue got solved on their side and we are still able to release the game on PSN for the original PSP fans in addition to the PC version.

MAC: I know initially there was some concern with the original Trails in the Sky coming to Steam due to the content differences between the PC and PSP versions. How did this end up getting worked out?

KB: This is still a work in progress, but if you've played any of our Ys releases on Steam then you'd know that our programmer did some amazing things by combining the best features from multiple past releases into a single "ultimate" version, so fingers crossed the same magic can happen again so that the PC version has all the added features from the PSP release.